Fifteen pioneering inventors nominated for European Inventor Award

EPO President Benoît
Battistelli: "Europe continues to be
a world leader in innovation"

Five winners will be
announced on 28 May in Amsterdam

Public invited to
cast their vote for a Popular Prize

Munich, 10
April 2013 -- Fifteen scientists and engineers have been nominated for
the European Inventor Award 2013 for their contributions to technological,
social and economic progress. The award is presented annually by the European
Patent Office (EPO) to outstanding inventors in five categories. For the first
time, the public, too, is invited to cast their vote to select the winner of
the Popular Prize from among the 15 finalists. The 2013 winners in all
categories will be announced at a ceremony in Amsterdam
on 28 May in the presence of Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix of
the Netherlands.

This year's nominees cover the fields of medical technology,
pharmaceuticals, optics, metallurgy, electronics, computers and LCD technology.
They originate from nine European and two non-European countries. The 15
finalists were selected by a prominent international jury from 160 inventors and
teams originally put forward.

"These cutting-edge inventions show that Europe
continues to be a world leader in innovation in all areas of technology from engineering
to medicine to computers," said EPO President Benoît Battistelli. "All
of this year's nominated inventors have not only come up with major scientific
and technological advances, but they have contributed to improving health and
standard of living, and created jobs and economic wealth. All of the inventions
are protected by a European patent, which has helped get many of them off the
ground."

Nominees by
category 1

Industry

José Luis López Gómez (Spain):
The inventions of this Spanish
railway engineer have made high-speed rail travel safer and more comfortable. He
created a new method of ensuring a train's wheels stay safely on track and keep
their optimal position on the rails at all times, especially in mountainous
regions, and allows trains to travel 30% faster when going though curving
stretches. His inventions propelled the company Patentes Talgo into one of the
top spots among manufacturers of high-speed trains worldwide.

Claus Hämmerle and Klaus
Brüstle (Austria): These
two inventors developed a damper system that facilitates the soft closing of
furniture doors, drawers and wall cabinets. Derived from the suspension of an
automobile and protected by numerous patents, 'Blumotion' is enjoying enormous
market success worldwide and has become an industry standard in the field, with
Austrian manufacturer Julius Blum exporting 96% of its products.

António Velez Marques, Helena Pereira, Rui Reis, Susana Silva (Portugal): This team of researchers at Amorim
Group, the world's leading producer and distributor of cork products, has
developed an efficient and environmentally-friendly method to maximise cork's
volume in order to attain significantly greater yields from the harvested
material. Using only microwaves and water, it is the first technique of its
kind that doesn't require sophisticated machinery or use any harmful chemicals.

Research

Patrick Couvreur, Barbara
Stella, Véronique Rosilio, Luigi Cattel (France, Italy): Thanks to the invention of this Belgian-born
nanotechnology pioneer and his team at Paris-Sud University,
the dream of eliminating cancer cells without harming healthy tissue has become
a reality. His nano-capsules - minuscule capsules 70 times smaller than red
blood cells and shielded by a biodegradable coating - deliver potent
anti-cancer drugs progressively and directly to tumour sites.

Jörg Horzel, Jozef Szlufcik, Mia Honore, Johan Nijs, (Belgium, Germany): German scientist Jörg Horzel and his team at IMEC, a micro-electronics and nanotechnology research centre based in Heverlee, Belgium, developed a process that contributes to the production of silicon-based solar cells, which were long too expensive for large, commercially viable production. There is now a more efficient path to solar power for the world’s solar-cell producers.

Philipp Koehn, Daniel Marcu,
Kevin Knight and William Wong (Germany, Romania,
United Kingdom, USA): German computer scientist Koehn
and his team at the University
of Southern California
invented phrase-based machine translation using a statistical approach. Koehn's
revolutionary method is being used by the biggest names in machine translation.
It is also used in the EPO's Patent Translate service for free machine
translation of patents. An entire
industry has emerged based on this invention.

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

Bruno Berge (France): The liquid lens, a revolutionary optical device
invented and patented by French physicist-cum-entrepreneur Bruno Berge, is
shaking up the market for optical instruments. Based on liquid changing its
shape when current is applied, this innovative lens enables better, cheaper and
smaller optical devices and is already used in a wide range of products,
including ID readers (such as barcode or passport readers) and industrial
cameras.

David Gow (United Kingdom): Scottish engineer David Gow is the inventor of the
world's first bionic hand. His revolutionary prosthetic arm and hand with mechanically
operable fingers allows the wearer to move individual fingers and perform
complicated grips. In the three years since its release, the iLIMB Hand has
been fitted to more than 1 400 patients worldwide, including war veterans and children
with congenital limb defects.

Pål Nyrén (Sweden): Swedish researcher Pål Nyrén and his team invented pyrosequencing
─ a far faster, less complicated and cheaper method to sequence DNA strands.
The combined advantages of lower costs and greater speeds has revolutionised
the study of the building blocks of life, and is giving researchers new avenues
for pursuing personalised treatments and cures for life-threatening diseases
such as cancer.

Non-European countries

Ajay V. Bhatt, Bala
Sudarshan Cadambi, Jeff Morriss, Shaun Knoll, Shelagh Callahan (USA): Intel computer expertAjay
Bhatt and his team created and developed Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology,
one of the most important advances in computing since the silicon chip. An
industry standard today, USB not only allows users to more easily connect
devices to a computer, it also streamlines work for hardware and software
developers. It is found in billions of electronic devices throughout the world,
from webcams to cell phones and memory sticks.

Joseph M. Jacobson,
Barrett Comiskey (USA): These two American
researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the electronic ink (e-ink)
display, which has become the industry standard in electronic reader devices.
Their lightweight, low-power technology, now incorporated into digital
books, allows people access to thousands of e-books anytime, anywhere, at a
lower cost, while being easier on the eyes and reducing the environmental
footprint of the publishing industry.

Sanghoon Joo, Myoungkyun Shin (South Korea), Martin Schmidt (Austria), et al.: Working across two countries (for Korean steelmaker POSCO and Siemens
VAI of Austria), this team jointly developed Finex, a cheaper, faster and
cleaner way to produce steel. Using fluidized bed reactors and coal
briquetters instead of sintering and coking, their method makes it
possible to use low-grade raw materials with
cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. This is important for an
industry responsible for more than a quarter of the world's industrial CO2
emissions.

Lifetime achievement

Yves Jongen (Belgium): An engineer at the Catholic
University of Leuven and later entrepreneur, Yves Jongen can be credited with
making proton therapy - which targets cancerous tumours more precisely and with less side effects than conventional
X-rays - available to a growing number of patients around the world. The smaller
and more affordable proton-generating device he invented (the "cyclotron") has
already helped nearly 21 000 patients and counting.

Martin
Schadt (Switzerland):
Working
for Hoffmann-LaRoche, in 1970 Swiss physicist Martin Schadt created the world's
first flat-panel liquid crystal display, better known as LCD. Schadt's
technology has paved the way for a wave of low-energy mobile devices, such as
tablet computers and mobile phones, now used by millions of consumers worldwide:
In 2012 alone, electronic manufacturers produced more than 40 million LCD TVs
using his technology

Sophie Wilson (United
Kingdom): Without the processors built by
Sophie Wilson in her career spanning 35 years, the development of affordable
personal computers and mobile devices would be unthinkable. Her ARM processor drastically
improved processing speed and slashed energy consumption. The descendants of her
original chip now power 95% of the
world's smartphones and a great number of other electronic devices.

About the European Inventor Award

Launched in 2006, the European Inventor Award is presented annually by the
European Patent Office. The award honours inventive individuals and teams whose pioneering work
provides answers to the challenges of our age and thereby contributes to social
progress, economic growth and prosperity. Nomination proposals are submitted by
the public, and by patent examiners at the EPO and Europe's
national patent offices. The finalists and, subsequently, the winners are
chosen from among the nominees by a high-profile international jury, which
includes experts from the areas of business, politics, media, academia and
research.

The 2013 award ceremony takes place on 28 May in Amsterdam and will be attended by Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands and a high-level audience. This year, for the first time ever, the general public is invited to cast its vote for the "Popular Prize".

About the EPO

With almost 7 000
employees, the European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the largest European
public service institutions. Its headquarters are in Munich
and it also has offices in Berlin, Brussels, The Hague and Vienna. The EPO was
founded with the aim of strengthening co-operation on patents in Europe. Through the EPO's centralised patent granting
procedure, inventors are able to obtain high-quality patent protection in the
38 member states of the European Patent Organisation. The EPO is also
the world's leading authority in patent information and patent searching.